


ten times round the seasons

by evewithanapple



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:15:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25632664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evewithanapple/pseuds/evewithanapple
Summary: With nothing else to do with her afterlife, Maude watches history go by.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 13
Collections: Every Woman 2020





	ten times round the seasons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DesertVixen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertVixen/gifts).



There is nothing especially dramatic or tragic about her death; nothing to inspire stories of ghostly occurrences years after the fact. She comes to the conclusion, eventually, that the living don’t really understand the dead. Can’t understand them. That, or they simply prefer exciting falsehoods to mundane truths.

It happens very quickly: she’s standing at the top of the staircase, overwhelmed with a sudden dizzy spell in the July heat. Her foot slides over the lip of the top step, she loses her balance, and she falls down, down –

* * *

She does not attend her own funeral.

She might have, had the option been open to her. But it’s two weeks after her death before she returns to her senses – such as they are – and by then, her body is in the ground. Besides, as she quickly discovers, she can’t actually leave the manor. She can walk the grounds, but as soon as she tries to set foot outside the gates, she will find herself standing back at the top of the stairwell. Unfair, she thinks: but also sensible. If the manner of her afterlife is proscribed by the manner of her death, then of course she must remain where she died. Her husband commissions a stone with her name in it – _Lady Maude of Sunderland, beloved wife and mother_ \- and it rests in the garden where she once loved to walk.

And it’s not so bad, not really. Positioned where she is, she can keep watch over her family. Her two little girls, just beginning to toddle when their mother died – she can watch them grow up. Her husband is a good man, and their nursemaid is a good woman, and she has no reason to fear for them. There is always someone to come running when one of them cries out, to hold and rock and soothe. She sits by their bedsides, but they cannot see her. None of the household can.

She comes close, once. Her smaller daughter, Annis, comes down with a fever sufficient for a physician to be called. She tosses and turns in her sickbed, whining fretfully. Her mother hovers over her, wringing invisible hands while her living family weeps and prays. At one point, Annis looks up at her mother – eyes locked on her, recognition writ large on her face – and reaches for her with tiny, grasping hands. Her mother reaches back, but their hands can’t meet; she is as insubstantial as a cloud.

It does not happen again. Annis recovers, and if she remembers seeing her mother, she says nothing of it. Maude keeps her distance for some time after that, rattled by the experience. If there is any chance of her pulling her children to the other side with her, she does not want to risk it.

* * *

Her husband remarries. She bears him no grudge for it; they had no sons, and he is in need of an heir. Her girls like their stepmother well enough, and are happy to be presented with a little brother. When they are old enough, they make good matches: her older daughter goes to a viscount in Northumberland, her younger to a baron in Lancashire. This is the first true wrench of separation: she cannot follow them, and she weeps ephemeral tears as their father and stepmother sees them off. She will not see them again. When they will die, it will be in a stranger’s house. She will never know what becomes of them.

When her husband dies, she wonders briefly if he will join her, or if he will wait for his second wife. It might be better that way; by this point, he has been wed to her longer than he ever was to Maude, and they have raised a family together. She was content enough with him when she was alive, but a love match it was not. If he loves the mother of his sons, he ought to remain with her.

At any rate, it doesn’t matter, because he does not die in the manor. He dies on a battlefield, far from home. She watches in silence as his second wife weeps, as his children – boys all, and full-grown – look sombre. His oldest son will have the manor; his second son will have a knighthood; his youngest will be given to the Church. So it goes.

When her successor dies – at home, in bed, with children and grandchildren in attendance – she looks on, wondering if she will finally have some company in her immortality. When the lady of the manor breathes her last, a cloud rises from her body – evidently invisible to the living gathered around her bed – and floats up and away, through the window and beyond. No spectral figure materializes beside her. She is still alone, as she has been, as she expects she will be forever.

* * *

She does not find companionship for another three hundred years, and when she does, it is by far more dramatic means than she would have hoped for. The current lord of the manor – a distant blood relation to her husband’s family, diluted through the centuries – marries a young and lovely woman called Katharine, twenty years old to his fifty. She has watched over dozens of ill-made matches at this point, and she could have told him – if she were able – how it would end. But she has no voice, so he learns this unpleasant lesson when he arrives home one day and finds his wife in an upstairs bedchamber with one of his retainers.

Disappointment would be understandable. Anger, even. Her understanding stops, however, when he draws his sword and runs through both his wife and her paramour. When the servants come running, he is still howling with rage. The noise carries on as he is dragged away, presumably to either a madhouse or a prison – she doesn’t know which. It is only when the manor is quiet again that she realizes she has company.

Katharine does nothing but weep for the first month. Maude tries to offer comfort, but realizes quickly that it’s no use: the girl is still too unsettled for conversation. It is six full months before she is calm enough to speak, and even then, she has very little to say. “I want to go home,” she sobs, “I want my mother. I want Edmund. I want to go home!”

There is no sign of her lover lingering in the manor. Perhaps men are less prone to lingering. Or perhaps he simply wasn’t that perturbed by the circumstances of his end. Maude still doesn’t know what it is that binds her to this place when so many others have gone peacefully to their reward.

Her fellow spirit passes the time in the chamber where she died, wailing at all hours of the day and night. The family who arrives after the old lord’s removal calls a priest to bless the manor, but it does no good, so they end up simply boarding up the offending room and leaving it at that. She spends half her time in the abandoned room with Katharine – she feels for the girl, still little more than a child and violently wrenched from the life she had anticipated – and the other half wandering the manor, watching over the new occupants. She prefers to watch over the children; they remind her of her own, now long dead and buried. They run and shout and play in the garden that had once been hers’, feet trodding over her stone where it has sunk into the ground.

One of them spots her, once or twice. The first time it happens, she is terrified, certain that this portends death for the little boy. But months pass, and no ill befalls him, and she begins to relax. It’s nice, in its way, to be seen. She’d almost forgotten.

When the boy is grown and married, he asks his wife what – if anything – she can see. She squints in Maude’s direction and says, faltering a little, that there is a mist there – nothing distinct, but definitely present. Neither of them seem especially perturbed by it. Perhaps growing up with Katharine has numbed him to any fear of spirits: after all, he’s come to no harm at their hands. Life in the manor goes on as it always has.

Interest in spirits waxes and wanes over the centuries. Stories of ghosts have firmly attached themselves to the manor by now, thanks to Katharine, but some seem more attuned to them than others. Katharine calms down somewhat over time, but she is still prone to fits of howling when the mood strikes her. At one point, the manor’s newly minted lady attempts to speak to Maude and Katharine through a summoning circle with many candles and knocking on the table. The séance itself has no effect on either of them, but Maude takes pity on her and knocks over an end table just so that she’ll have something to show for the whole production.

Fifty years or so after the séance, the lady of the manor dies and no one comes to replace her. Instead, the manor’s contents – hundreds of years of art and furniture and other detritus of lives well-lived – are carted away en masse. Katharine thinks the building is about to be torn down, and starts to wail again. Maude, unsure of what will happen if the place she is tied to is knocked out from under her, only watches and waits. Katharine manages to frighten away the men who’ve come to take the furniture for a little while, but eventually some with stiffer spines and earplugs arrive to take the last of it.

It’s the digging up of the garden that upsets Maude the most. She’s tempted to start wailing along with Katharine, but when she tries, the men take no notice. When one of them trips over her stone, half-unearthed by ploughs, she cries out and they almost seem to hear her. They look around, then at each other, and shrug.

“Take it to the professor,” one of them says, and they pull it free of the dirt and carry it away. She weeps, then. Katharine weeps with her, and she’s grateful for the company.

She’s not expecting to see it again, so it comes as a surprise when the workmen return to re-install it in the garden. It’s been properly cleaned of mud and lichen, and although the words have all but faded away with time, she can still trace them with her finger. Of greater interest – although she does not notice it at first, and Katharine has to point it out to her – is the great banner unfurled across what was once the dining hall. It spans over twenty-five feet in length, and is dotted with names and dates all the way around. Katharine locates her own name quickly, pointing. “Look.”

Maude looks. A small oval portrait of Katherine has been emblazoned on the banner, inscribed underneath with _Lady Katharine Threston, b. 1623, m. 1642, d. 1643_.

“There’s a plaque for Edmund,” Katharine says, “in the upper chamber. And look, here – “ She takes Maude’s hand and pulls, and Maude lets her. Even after five hundred years, she still has the energy of youth.

When they reach the far end of the banner, Katharine drops Maude’s hand and points. Maude follows her gaze and takes in a breath, though she hasn’t needed to for a long time. On the wall, beside a crudely etched drawing of her (she remembers it; her husband had sketched it in the psalter he had given her when their older daughter was born) is her name, printed in swirling script just as it once had been on her stone in the garden. _Lady Maude of Sunderland, b. 1341, m. 1363, d. 1372. Wife to Lord Geoffrey of Barnard, mother to Juliana and Annis_. Beside her is a portrait of Geoffrey, and beneath are two unfamiliar portraits that bear traces of the daughters she remembers.

“They remember us,” Katharine says, awe-struck. Maude turns to look around the room, noting strangers – at least a dozen – who are ambling along the banner, occasionally stopping to point out a name or portrait that catches their attention. She was in the ground six hundred years before any of these people were born, and they cannot see her now; but they can read her name.

She looks at Katharine. Her fellow spirit’s eyes are filled with tears, but for once, she does not seem predisposed to howl her grief. She looks, for the first time, relieved.

Maude takes her hand. “I know,” she says, and something heavy within her lifts. “I know.”


End file.
